
Home improvement firms face many hurdles when
trying to attract customers, according to The State of Customer Acquisition, a new study from Porch Group Media, conducted by Ascend2.
Of the marketers polled, 88% say acquiring
new customers has become more difficult. And 49% plan to greatly adjust their acquisition strategies over the next year.
Of course, they’re not doing that badly: 58%
achieve at least moderate ROI and 33% very high. But they need data.
Case in point: 90% say their targeting would be improved by access to detailed property data — maintenance
needs, recent upgrades, etc..
Home improvement marketers also rely on:
- Home improvement data (roof in need of repair, windows in need of replacement) —
44%
- Behavioral data (purchase history, website activity — 37%
- Property data—(e.g., homeownership, property size, home value) —
30%
- Demographics (age, income, education) — 28%
- Transactional data (order value/purchase frequency) — 28%
- Intent data
(search activity, online engagement) — 27%
- Geographic data (location, zip codes) — 23%
- Psychographic data (lifestyle, values) —
15%
Yet these data challenges persist:
- Ensuring data accuracy and completeness issues — 51%
- High
cost of third-party data — 49%
- Limited access to real-time data updates — 39%
- Privacy and compliance concerns — 37%
- Difficulty integrating data with marketing systems — 33%
- Lack of internal expertise or resources — 32%
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How do they identify
potential customers now?
- Social media activity (e.g., likes, shares, comments) — 78%
- Online search behavior (e.g. keywords, queries, site visits)
— 77%
- Content engagement (e.g., ad interactions, downloads, video watches) — 77%
- Email engagement (e.g., open rates, click-through rates)
— 65%
- Purchase signals (e.g., product comparisons, cart additions) — 64%
- Other — 3%
Meanwhile, here are the
channels and strategies utilized by home improvement marketers:
- Social media marketing — 75%
- Email marketing —
71%
- Search engine optimization (SEO — 62%
- Paid ads — 60%
- Direct mail — 53%
- TV (including
CTV) — 50%
- Retail and point of sale promotions — 48%
- Purchasing leads — 40%
- Telemarketing
— 39%
- Other — 4%
- None of the above — 1%
Note the
relatively small percentage of firms purchasing leads. This suggests a shift toward first-party data strategies.
Ascend2 surveyed 270 industry marketing professionals. Of these, 33%
provide home improvement or maintenance services, 23% sell home improvement or lifestyle products and 44% are both service providers and retailers.